How the Bay Area’s counterculture helped sprout hippie food

Chronicle artist Don Asmussen was inspired by the iconic Woodstock poster from 1969 to show how the hippie generation influenced not only music but ushered "natural foods" into the mainstream, which is the subject of a new book, "Hippie Food," by Chronicle staff writer Jonathan Kauffman.

There is no dish in town like Ananda Fuara’s Neatloaf, a square-edged rectangle of tofu, ricotta and spices lacquered with a sweet-tart brown glaze. That is to say, there is no dish like it left in town: The San Francisco restaurant’s Neatloaf is a rare remnant of the earthy, beany vegetarian cuisine of the 1970s.

My generation, raised in the shadow of the Baby Boom, later called this cuisine “hippie food”: Masses of vegetables stir-fried with tofu over brown rice. Whole-wheat bread so dense that chewing felt as if you were excavating the vitamins embedded inside. Sandwiches of avocado and alfalfa sprouts. Homemade yogurt dressed with wheat germ and honey, because sugar was verboten, of course.

As much as I still love — unironically — the Neatloaf, Bay Area restaurants have abandoned bean-nut loaves and salads with lemon-tahini dressings. Yet the influence of the 1970s counterculture food movement is too great to be laughed off.

In my new book, “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat” (William Morrow, 352 pages, $26.99), I traced how this grassroots movement brought brown rice and granola to every corner of the country, major cities and rural enclaves alike. Not surprisingly, the Bay Area was one of the movement’s most high-voltage transmitters, and once-fringe foods like yogurt, sprouts and smoothies seem as much a part of our native cuisine as cioppino.

The actual Haight-Ashbury hippies had little to do with hippie food, though during the Summer of Love the Diggers — the Haight Street freaks’ radical philosophers — were baking whole-wheat bread in coffee cans to give away for free in the Panhandle.

More significant than the Diggers, perhaps, was a tiny vitamin-and-lecithin store that Fred Rohé took over in the Inner Sunset in 1965. Shortly afterward, he renamed it New Age Natural Foods, stocking bulk bins of whole grains as well as macrobiotic staples like tamari and miso. The store established a look — earthy, woodsy, with a meditation station — as well as a counterculture tone that would soon be copied nationwide.

At first, the interest in natural foods led young Americans to macrobiotics, a nutritional philosophy that George Ohsawa introduced to the United States in 1960. Macrobiotics taught a Japanese peasant diet that would balance yin and yang in our bodies.

Other influences quickly flowed in. Instructed by Southern California health food prophets such as Gayelord Hauser and Adelle Davis, counterculture kids adopted juices, wheat germ and brewer’s yeast. From the Seventh Day Adventists, they gleaned recipes for granola and a century’s worth of vegetarian dishes. To make their hearty, very brown, often bland cuisine palatable, young cooks embraced flavors they encountered in travels as well as the Indian and East Asian spiritual traditions they romanticized, with all the cultural ferment and ugly naiveté their motivations embodied.

The Bay Area’s influence on the natural-foods movement was both one of politics and style.

Early on, “food conspiracies” took hold, first in Berkeley and soon after across San Francisco Bay. Communes and households would band together to make massive group purchases from dry-goods wholesalers and farmers’ markets. The volunteers would meet to distribute their hauls, sometimes adding a dinner or a political discussion to the event. Within a few years, says Lois Wickstrom, author of the 1974 “Food Conspiracy Cookbook,” the East Bay food conspiracies were collectively spending $200,000 a year.

Part of the rationale was economic. Wickstrom joined a conspiracy in Albany in 1969 because she, her grad-student husband and their kids were living on $300 a month. “We needed a way to get our food cheaply,” she says now.

As the concept took hold in more rural parts of the country, conspiracies became a way for people to buy whole grains, undyed cheese or other health foods their supermarkets wouldn’t stock. Many of these buying clubs graduated into food co-ops and co-op networks like the People’s Food System in the Bay Area (see sidebar).

California was also one of the crucibles for organic agriculture. At UC Santa Cruz, horticulturalist Alan Chadwick taught biodynamic agriculture to hundreds of his students. As counterculture-minded people moved to Marin or Mendocino to live off the land, their ecological ideals led them to farm organically. One was Warren Weber, a Ph.D. student from Berkeley, whose Star Route Farms in Bolinas became the first certified organic farm in the state in 1974.

Just as young Americans all over the country were taking to lentils and barley, the Bay Area taught them to cook this new cuisine.

How the Bay Area’s counterculture helped sprout hippie...

1of 5A young couple walk with a picnic basket in Golden Gate Park in S.F., circa February 1969.Photo: Robert Altman, Getty Images

2of 5A man poses for a portrait in front of a S.F. restaurant with a “No Hippies Allowed” sign in 1968.Photo: Robert Altman, Getty Images

3of 5Counterculture icon Stephen Gaskin (1935-2014) during the Haight Street Faire at Golden Gate Park on May 24, 1969. He led 250 young San Franciscans to rural Tennessee, where they founded The Farm, the country’s largest vegan commune.Photo: Robert Altman, Getty Images

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5of 5Bloody Mary shot in the Chronicle studio in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, January 3, 2017.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

Just as it does today, California’s four-season agriculture allowed cooks here to combine the idea of healthy food with an offhanded, appealing freshness that made their food as hip as it was earnest. For every ascetic vegetarian restaurant like Communion in SoMa, which required diners to eat in silence, there was a place like Shandygaff.

In 1969, Rubin Glickman, a lawyer who counted rock promoter Bill Graham and Janis Joplin among his clients, opened Shandygaff, a restaurant on the corner of Polk and Washington streets. “I couldn’t find a good healthy place to eat,” Glickman, an early marathoner, now says. He hung colorful banners from the ceiling and sent the cigarette smokers into a closed-off room to exhale. Glickman found farmers to supply Shandygaff with organic vegetables for his giant salads and fertile eggs for his vegetarian omelets. “We hope to satisfy the most devoted hedonist,” its menu proclaimed.

In the five years that it flourished, the Shandygaff’s regulars included Carlos Santana, Richard Brautigan and Alex Haley. One of the Shandygaff’s cooks, Mollie Katzen, moved to Ithaca, N.Y., to start a collective restaurant whose dishes became the basis for her “Moosewood Cookbook,” one of the best-selling U.S. cookbooks of all time.

Hippie Food

Hippie food may have faded from restaurants, and the majority of the tiny natural-foods co-ops of the 1970s may have folded. But the ingredients the counterculture embraced have not gone away.

Organic agriculture is now a more than $40 billion business. Most mainstream grocery stores carry whole wheat bread, organic fruits, even wheat germ and carob powder. Hummus and yogurt are childhood staples. “I think today you can go to any restaurant and find healthy food,” Glickman now says.

The cuisine has evolved as well. Neka Pasquale, owner of Point Richmond-based Urban Remedy, grew up in Marin and the Mendocino hills in the 1970s. “My mom was into the cutting-edge nutrition of that time so I grew up eating mochi, rice bread, all of that stuff,” she says. “Once I started school, I couldn’t wait to go to friends’ houses, where they had Tollhouse cookies and sugary cereals.”

As an adult, though, the trained acupuncturist and former private chef embraced the wisdom of her mother’s diet. In 2012, she founded Urban Remedy to supply juices and vegan food, 2018-style. Macro bowls with quinoa, kale and chickpea croutons. VLT wraps with smoky dehydrated-eggplant “bacon.”

Like 1970s food, Urban Remedy’s dishes are organic, vegetable-driven and internationally inspired. But they’re lower in fat and more brightly flavored. “You’re not plugging your nose, tasting something that taste like grass and dirt,” Pasquale says. Where 1970s cooks boosted their dishes with wheat germ and brewer’s yeast, she adds superfoods like raw cacao or hemp seeds.

Urban Remedy now has 13 locations and grab-and-go kiosks in dozens of Whole Foods stores. Last week, it installed grab-and-go shelves in four local hospitals.

“I want to get people excited about eating hippie food, but in a way where it’s really amazing,” Pasquale says, “from the way it excites your senses with the way it looks, to the different textures and flavors.”

1965: Fred Rohé takes over a vitamin shop named Sunset Health Food Store and, a few years later, renames it New Age Natural Foods.

1965-1970: Counterculture kids pick up George Ohsawa’s writings on macrobiotics and open macrobiotic restaurants, notably Here and Now in San Francisco and the O-Soba Noodle Nook in Berkeley.

1967: The Diggers make hot stews and bake whole-wheat bread to distribute to the Love Generation in the Panhandle.

The Diggers provide free food in the Panhandle in S.F.

Photo: Ted Streshinsky Photographic Archive, Corbis via Getty Images

1969-1978: The appearance of natural food restaurants such as the Shandygaff, Dipti Nivas and Communion in San Francisco; the Swallow in Berkeley (Ruth Reichl was a cook-owner); the Trident in Sausalito; and the Reno-based Good Earth franchise, which operated locations around the Bay Area.

1969-1972: The Berkeley Food Conspiracy forms, inspiring hundreds of similar “cells” in the Bay Area and beyond.

1971: Berkeley resident Frances Moore Lappé writes “Diet For a Small Planet,” whose critique of the agricultural system ignites a new zeal for vegetarian food.

1971: A young Zen monk named Edward Espe Brown, head cook at the Tassajara monastery, writes the “Tassajara Bread Book.” The book teaches a generation how to make flavorful whole-wheat bread instead of bricks of dark dough.

1971: Nation of Islam member Yusef Bey moves Your Black Muslim Bakery from Santa Barbara to Oakland, where it sells whole-grain breads, cakes and pies, many free of refined sugars as well.

1972-1978: The era sees the rise and collapse of the San Francisco People’s Food System, a network of food co-ops and nonprofit businesses supplied by a collectively run distributor.

1975: A former Stanford student and Zen monk named Bill Shurtleff and his partner, Akiko Aoyagi, write “The Book of Tofu,” which inspires San Francisco’s Wildwood Natural Foods and dozens of other tofu-making collectives to start up.

Jonathan Kauffman has been writing about food for The Chronicle since the spring of 2014. He focuses on the intersection of food and culture — whether that be profiling chefs, tracking new trends in nonwestern cuisines, or examining the impact of technology on the way we eat.

After cooking for a number of years in Minnesota and San Francisco, Kauffman left the kitchen to become a journalist. He reviewed restaurants for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly) before abandoning criticism in order to tell the stories behind the food. His first book, “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat,” was published in 2018.